Open Source Monitoring - with ConSol Devices & Tools

OMD is a comprehensive open source monitoring solution bundling out-of-the-box Cores Nagios, Naemon and Icinga with their most useful add-ons into a complete package. A revolutionary site concept allows for parallel operation of several fully-fledged installations on one single server. The update effort for a complete Nagios installation using OMD is minimal. ConSol employees Sven Nierlein and Gerhard Laußer have been members of the OMD development team omdistro.org from the very beginning. At ConSol, we prefer the Open Monitoring Distribution Labs Edition as proven basis for Nagios installations.

The Mod-Gearman module developed by ConSol enables the distributed execution of several thousand checks and event handlers per minute. They are no longer executed "classically" by Nagios itself, but as "jobs" by so-called "workers". The result is being encrypted and sent back to Nagios.

Thruk is a modern web interface for Nagios that is also compatible with Icinga and Icinga 2. Sven Nierlein of ConSol developed it because the classic web interface of Nagios had been hardly further developed for several years and therefor had no longer met the requirements of modern open source monitoring. Thruk makes life easier for the monitoring administrator with a host of additional features and useful aids, among them powerful dashboards. Globally distributed IT monitoring landscapes consisting of hundreds of instances can be easily operated with the help of Thruk.

SNClient+ is an up-to-date monitoring agent for Windows and Unix systems, developed by Sven Nierlein. This agent fixes SSL cipher problems that have made the operation of similar products risky for years. In addition to a strong emphasis on slimness and maintainability of the code, care was also taken to adopt familiar functions of the established NSClient++. The migration from NSClient++ to SNClient+ is seamless, without the need to adapt existing configuration files. A special highlight is the integration of Mod-Gearman, which enables a continuous flow of check jobs and results via a queue, thus considerably relieving the monitoring servers.

The Coshsh framework by Gerhard Laußer automatically generates the configuration files for Nagios-based IT monitoring systems. Necessary information about servers and applications as well as their contact persons and dependencies are read from any data source and converted into host, service and contact definitions. Advantage: Inventory data only need to be maintained by the server and application managers.

The IT monitoring newcomer Prometheus is already the de facto standard for monitoring Kubernetes and OpenShift environments. But Prometheus can also play to its strengths in the monitoring of network devices, for example. To be able to monitor applications and systems in detail, the tool records and evaluates metrics. It thereby, among other things, also allows for designing complex alerts. For long-term storage of extremely large time series data sets (>= Tera Byte) with high cardinality, we use Thanos (optimized for infinite quantities, e.g. via S3 storage) and VictoriaMetrics (optimized for performance).

The classic Nagios and its successors Naemon and Icinga / Incinga 2 form the core of open source IT monitoring. All three have been in use for many years and have proven themselves extremely well both in smaller projects and in globally distributed IT monitoring landscapes.

The performance data for classic IT monitoring adds up to a considerable amount of data. We store this data in the time-series database InfluxDBto save space. And the visualization tool Grafana creates clear dashboards from this data.

Ansible has become an integral part of the architecture of complex system landscapes. The automation tool helps to orchestrate servers and many other devices. Ansible helps to define desired system states easily and reusable.

Grafana has quickly become the most popular tool for displaying graphs and dashboards. It can be connected to a variety of data sources, including Prometheus and InfluxDB, but also to classic databases such as MySQL or Microsoft SQL. Grafana not only helps to visualize the recorded metrics, but also helps to better understand them, making this tool indispensable in heterogeneous IT monitoring landscapes.

ConSol has developed Nagios plug-ins for the four most common databases Oracle, MySQL, DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server. The plug-ins are state-of-the-art for uniform IT monitoring of a heterogeneous database landscape on an open source basis.